“Her family?”
“Your father really hasn’t told you any of it, has he?” He grinned, glancing back toward my father, whose silence was beginning to infuriate me. I avoided looking at him across the table, even as I felt a pang of disloyalty.
“I don’t know anything about her,” I said. And as I said it, I knew that I had chosen a side, but hadn’t my father kept everything about my mother from me my whole life? Wasn’t he simply standing by as Sikander marched into Shalingar to make me his bride, technically against my will? I was owed something. An explanation. That was all I was asking for. It wasn’t very much, I realized, and this realization made me even angrier.
“Your mother came from the aristocracy of Macedon. They were very liberal in their politics. Troublemakers, intellectuals, revolutionaries. The kind that don’t fight. The kind that talk.” He shook his head and laughed. “They were very outspoken about their vehement dislike of my father’s rule. None of them survived, of course.”
My heart stopped. “What do you mean?”
“There was a raid on their home, sometime before your father left Macedon with you.” He turned to me, pressing his hands together in a strangely watered-down mea culpa. “My father didn’t like his critics very much. It had to be done. Her parents—your grandparents—were taken in for questioning. Her brother too. They died in prison, as far as I know. But your mother, she escaped.”
“Escaped?”
“They weren’t able to locate her. She’s still on the loose, as far as I know. In hiding, I suppose. So your father never told you that you have criminal blood in your veins, eh?” He laughed, looking back at my father. “I’m sure she wonders about you too.”
“You mean she’s—” Alive. My mother is alive.
But Sikander was lost in his own thoughts. “Every man at that school was in love with her, but she was quite taken with your father,” he said, pointing his spoon at my father. “It was back in the days that the Academy accepted women. Not anymore. I find them to be an unnecessary distraction.”
At that very moment, my father’s gaze caught mine from across the table. He looked from me to Sikander, and I could tell from the frozen expression on his face that he had completely lost control of the situation.
“We were such . . . idealists back then, weren’t we?” Sikander went on, lifting his knife and turning it in his fingers before he drove it into the spiced quail sitting on his plate. “But much has changed since then. We’ve changed. We live in modern times . . . I wish I had your idealism, Chandradev, but I live in the real world. Not in a land of magical talking trees.”
We were all silent, stunned. I glanced at Arjun, who furrowed his brow at me. Sikander looked around the room at his advisors, then at my father’s.
He choked out his words in anger, emphasizing each one. “Fairy tales mean nothing to me. Stories have never saved anyone. Time moves forward, and you have to decide: Do you want it to move on without you? Think of the future of your kingdom. Think of Amrita’s future,” he said, and he pointed his hand at me, a gesture that made me shrink in my chair. “Right now, you have a choice. What happened to this Land of Trees of yours—that’s just the nature of the world. One can’t resist the world forever. And if you resist now, you won’t have the choice later.”
Four
SEVERAL SETS OF EYES turned to look at me as I burst through the door of the Map Chamber, holding back my tears. I hadn’t expected to see all of Papa’s advisors there with him: Shree, Bandaka, Ali. I glanced around the room. His entire council of advisors was meeting past midnight, the large wooden table before them covered with maps and scrolls of parchment filled with frenetic text. Papa’s security detail was there too, all of them still dressed in their khalats. They must have reconvened right after dinner.
An emergency meeting, I realized. I quickly wiped away my tears, embarassed. It was instinct by now. I remembered the words Mala had recited to me since I was little: Royalty does not make a scene. Royalty behaves with dignity, poise, decorum, grace, compassion. Royalty remembers responsibility, maintains their composure, knows they are constantly being watched. Royalty must be brave, strategic, loyal.
In bursting in on my father, or in betraying him by asking Sikander about my mother, I had displayed none of these characteristics. Yet I was simultaneously furious and confused. My father was the only one who could clarify everything for me, and he knew it.
Dinner had ended on a tense note, with Sikander curtly excusing himself to retire to the guest quarters and my father disappearing soon after. I sensed I would find him in here, where he was most at ease and entirely in control, but I wasn’t expecting him to be in the midst of an emergency congress.
“You’re all dismissed.” He turned to his advisors. “Turn in for the night. We’ll convene early tomorrow morning and start where we left off.”
Shree’s voice carried a hint of worry. “But, Your Majesty, we still haven’t come up with a solution—”
“And we will. Tomorrow.”
I watched guiltily as Papa’s advisors and security trailed out the door. And then there were just two of us, standing on either side of the Map Chamber. My father at the head of the heavy wooden table carved from a banyan tree that Arjun and I used to play under when we were children, and me by the door, waiting for him to explain.
We looked at each other across the dimly lit room, maps of Shalingar, of Lake Chanakya, of Persia, Macedon, the entire east, surrounding us. I had studied those maps so carefully, memorizing capitals, learning about topography, the economy, trade. I had painstakingly studied the customs and beliefs of all the lands south of the Jhelum River and many of the lands north of it too. I knew the history of every kingdom that surrounded us, including our own, but I didn’t know my own past. I didn’t know who I was. And I couldn’t help but conclude that it was my father’s fault.
But my father was quiet. He simply pressed his palms into the table before him and watched me silently, and I could tell he was trying to decide what to say.
“Sit down,” he said softly, and I came around the table as he pulled a chair out for me.
He poured a tumbler of water from an earthen carafe and placed it before me, squeezing my shoulder with his other hand. Then he sat down and looked out the window, taking a deep breath. My eyes followed his to the highest mountain in the distance. Mount Moutza. I remember Mala telling me its name. The Mountain of Miracles. It was on the way to the Janaka Caves, where the Sybillines supposedly lived.
Mala had told me a fable about the mountain when I was a child. It was the site where the Diviners, the first humans, met with and built an alliance with the vetalas, the cunning and beautiful ghouls that haunted people’s souls. No one had seen a vetala in hundreds of years, but it was believed that they once wandered the Earth as though it was theirs.